Archive for 2006

My birthday came and went (as has most of Christmas) this past week, and I was lucky enough to receive a DS and a copy of Trauma Center.

Regardless of what other people may tell you, I think this may well be the coolest game on the DS. It’s just about the perfect style of game. I’d heard good things, but I didn’t expect it to be nearly this fun. It’s looking like it may be kind of short-ish, but it’s a very, very intense game at times.

Other than that… Xenosaga 2 is looking kind of meh. I was optimistic going in, but I really don’t like what they did with most of the character designs, and the completely different voice cast is a turn-off too. Battle system looks like it’s going to be kind of bland as well. I may wait until I’m back at school to resume it.

So I extracted this a while back, since I wanted the Baron Aloha pictures. Figured I have it, so I may as well post it someplace. Here is the intro to Jumping Flash! 2 for Playstation. Enjoy the not-so-subtle humor and awesome German accent.

I finished FFXII and will almost certainly write a review for it at VL. Speaking of which, I wrote a rant about Koei’s sad state of affairs there, too. My next project is the Xenosaga series; I’m replaying the first one, then I’ll move on to the second and third, which I haven’t tried yet. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the frenetic action-RPGness of FFXII.

So I was thinking about Three Kingdoms the other day (so what else is new, eh?).

My favorite character is not one of the major players, nor one of the more spectacular generals. He’s a general by the name of Cheng Pu, who served the Sun family. But I hadn’t really realized why. He embodies three characteristics that I feel are important:

Loyalty / Honor: After his liege Sun Jian died, he refused to debase himself by taking rank under Yuan Shu, choosing instead to serve Jian’s son Ce as retainer.

Reliability: Cheng Pu was easily one of Wu’s most steady generals. He never lost a single duel, and distinguished himself in every engagement in which he was involved.

Self-improvement: Though his age and rank made him initially dislike – and insult – the younger Zhou Yu who had been appointed above him, once he realized Yu was worthy of his respect, he was quick to apologize for his earlier mistake and aided Zhou Yu in both Chi Bi and the campaigns thereafter.

Cheng Pu’s story is probably one of the more believable ones in the novel, as it has him doing nothing that could really be doubted. His historical biography is also relatively low on information, but from what I can tell, he was really one of the more impressive – and less well-known – officers of his time.

As you may know, I started playing FFXII 4-5 weeks ago. Well, I’m finally nearing the end of it – 50+ hours of gameplay so far – and I’m still impressed.

I enjoyed Suikoden V more (obviously, since I beat it in maybe 2 weeks and it’s at least as long) but it’s still a decent game. Just about the only part that is not good about it is the music. I like game music to be a bit ambient in places, but it’s just too downplayed to be interesting. But other than that… the battle system is solid, the story is fairly good (if a bit like Star Wars), characterization is okay, and (perhaps most importantly) Vaan isn’t Tidus (Vaan dresses slightly better and is less whiny).

I think the nicest part of the game is the translation. The localization team used a good deal of old English grammar and style, which gives the game a feel similar to that of Dragon Quest VIII. Probably the nicest translation for an FF game I’ve seen so far.

Also remotely related to FFXII, everyone I know is progressing faster than me. One of my roommates and a friend have already beaten it once and are replaying it to break the game still more, while another roommate started playing it and is almost as far as me. None of them had started the game 3 weeks ago. The only reason I’m keeping up with Lord Yuan Shu is because he got fed up with the side-quests and replayed Tactics for most of the past week instead. The question is, am I just not as into the game as other people? Am I slow at games (probably not)? Or has Stepmania slowly crept in and stolen much of the time I would’ve spent playing FFXII?

Here I thought Wild Arms: Alter Code F would be the worst example of a recent game that has an unintentionally bad translation.

Then I picked up a copy of Breath of Fire 2 for GBA. I’d heard a vagary or two, but nothing specific, and I don’t own the game for SNES, so I figured I’d grab it and play through it on a plane or two sometime.

The game itself is fairly good (though hard to read on my original-model GBA). The engine is solid, runs fairly fast, and all that. Music’s a bit repetetive, but there’s only so much that can be done on GBA anyway.

That’s where the good ends. I’m painfully aware of what the problem is; they translated without expanding the script, so they had huge space limitation issues. Same thing that happened with me and Jesus, with two major differences; they didn’t significantly reword to save space, and it’s a professional translation.

As a result, the translators occasionally use line breaks as a sentence-ender (which I made sure to avoid), and bother with periods about half the time. Plot is better-done, but townspeople talk is bad.
It’s like if I were to write

sort of like this

But you never know if

I’m ending a sentence

I’m enjoying the game other than that, but I wince every once in a while when I see something particularly bad.